For me this is a story about guilt. The narrator and his friend are most definitely up to something. Sharing opium and overly intimate for the 1850s, they bury an invisible monster, the manifestation of their unspoken vice, in the garden.

I reckon O’Brien beats Poe for style in this story. Brilliant.

I was profoundly influenced by O’Brien’s “What Was It?” in writing this novel, and also influenced by O’Brien’s more obscure story “From Hand to Mouth”.

It was my intention that the invisible humanoids in my novel were the same species as O’Brien’s invisible creature in “What Was It?”, and coming from the same place. O’Brien does not say where his creature came from, but surely it is not native to Earth: if it were, then humans would encounter them more frequently.

My novel “The Woman Between the Worlds” is told in first-person by an unnamed narrator, just like “What Was It?”. I originally intended to end my novel with the last sentence of O’Brien’s story, but eventually decided against this.

What specifically didn’t you understand? If you pop a few questions into the comments here I’d be happy to have a go at helping you.

Off with me then to see if I could find said face. Lo and behold, the whole book is up on t’interweb.

A quick flick through reveals the volume to be liberally stuffed with grotesque heads. Here’s one page:

Here’s another:

My French is rusty/non-existent so I haven’t a clue what the odd bits of text say, but the faces tell their own stories.

*forlornly blows his club whistle to attract attention*

The banter in the garden with Dr. Hammond had me pulling the sheet up under my eyes.

Forgot about that! Some good stuff there re: the “one Something more terrible than any other thing”.

Here’s another delicious taste:

We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the Terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me, “What do you consider to be the greatest element of Terror?”

The question, I own, puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew. Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she sank, shrieks that rent one’s heart, while we, the spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance.

I thought it was going to be scary. But then it wasn’t.

I had the same experience. I’d read a brief summary of it a while back and thought – “An unknown (perhaps unknowable) invisible entity that attacks at night. Sounds terrifying”.

The fact that it lets the winds out of its own sails is, I think, a feather in its cap, and (as you suggest) a satisfying turn. The way I read it is that this isn’t really a dramatic tale of ‘good’ encountering evil but rather a case of two worlds colliding. The entity seems equally anxious and distressed about the fact of the narrator’s existence as he is of its (if that makes sense).

Though this isn’t (I don’t think) a completely successful work, it is remarkable in that the human protagonists (i.e ‘us’) effectively kill the creature by imprisoning it. There’s a lovely thread of guilt running through the 2nd half, in sentences like…

It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.

Which, I suppose, is what made Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker so interesting.

The narrative took a bit of a right turn.

That the creature took on a wretched and pitiable aspect was good.

I think if the story had started in the garden or when he went to bed, it would have been much more satisfying a narrative.

He broke the number one rule of Hollywood scriptwriting. Never start a scene any earlier than the last possible second after which it wouldn’t make any sense.